Better Customer Service Starts on Your Website

February 2015

Imagine being able to reduce your customer service costs while at the same time increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. Most customer service initiatives help with one at the expense of the other. Adding more customer service agents brings down call waiting times, but can be an expensive proposition. Automated systems reduce costs, but as anyone who has ever tried to reach an airline knows, wading through a phone menu to get a simple question answered is pretty frustrating.

Fortunately, there’s a simple and inexpensive addition you can make to your website that will improve your customer service while reducing costs – live chat software. Increasingly a standard component of good website design, live chat has demonstrated its value to companies large and small. Online chat creates a powerful service channel, improving call center and help desk efficiency. And customers prefer live chat because they are already online, and don’t have to pick up a phone and wait in a phone queue.
To see how prevalent live chat is becoming, try this simple test. Visit the websites of 5-10 companies that you regularly do business with as a business person or an individual consumer. Count how many have a live chat button on their website. I’ll bet you find a live chat button on more than half.

Now try this same test with your top competitors, or if you’re a public entity, with your peers. If few or none have live chat, your peer group is lagging the market, and you have an opportunity to build an advantage by being among the first to adopt live chat. If most of your peers already have live chat, what are you waiting for? You’re behind, and you may be losing customers to others who are offering better customer service.

If you’d like to learn more about what live chat can do for your company, check out some case stories here. Then talk to the team at Americaneagle.com about incorporating live chat in your next website update.